Does Apple have any developer guidelines on use of geolocation information, or do they presume that because there's fine grained controls over privileges that they don't need to have any?
I would think that apps without any rational need for location information (like useless wallpaper apps) would raise a red flag for further scrutiny. Unless of course Apple sees collecting geolocation information on users to resell elsewhere as just "part of the app business model".
I don't know about requirements, I just use theirs because I'm lazy and don't want to do the work to figure out what else to buy. I literally only use it as ethernet handoff to my own equipment so the make/model/features don't mean anything to me. The only thing I don't want is their POS wireless running on it, and mine doesn't have that.
I recently had mine replaced with a newer model after experiencing some problems (which turned out to be local RF cabling issues of my own creation).
I haven't had a reliability problem with their modems, really.
Vultr was another provider I found that looked to be friendly enough for FreeBSD/pfsense.
I need to finally bite the bullet and sign up for at least one of them to at least do a proof of concept to know that it will work as I expect before I decide on a final provider and make the leap to fiber and give up my at home statics (something I've had since getting DSL in 1999).
CenturyLink/Qwest's DSL was always available around here in a pick your own ISP model, so telco provided the signalling and the ISP provided the IP. I had an ISP that gave/30s then.
But the new CL fiber doesn't provide for any static IPs as far as I know. Which isn't too far, all I've done is talk to the rent-a-sales guy who was going door to door. But he did know what I was talking about and said I wasn't the first one to ask, either.
From what I can tell, the other fiber provider, US Internet can do statics, but only for a much pricier business account -- IIRC, it was $250 or something a month, which might be reasonable for an actual business, but is way more than I need to spend.
The idea wouldn't be a safe that blows up and kills the safecracker, but one that uses sensors and failsafes to induce destruction of the contents.
Most high-end safes and vaults have glass rods in them that hold back part of the mechanism that controls entry -- excessive physical force will break these and disable the safe from being opened, often even with the combination. Some have extra bolts that will fall that cannot be retracted by any mechanical means and require extensive physical breaching to enter.
Obviously destroying the contents without harming the structure its housed in or someone trying to enter it is a complex engineering question that's dependent on what's being protected and the means to destroy it. It could be that you'd require the secret info to be stored on heat sensitive paper and enclosed within an internal, self-powered oven that would heat up sufficiently to destroy the document (like a thermal sales slip left in a hot car). Or it could be magnetic media stored basically in a degaussing container that would expose the media to a degaussing field if intrusion was detected. Or maybe some kind of crucible container that would flood with a harsh acid but contain the acid.
Blackberry caved to a number of governments to allow access to their secure network. Not just "help us decrypt this one device" but ongoing access to the entire encrypted network.
I think that had little to do with their failure, though. Their failure was due to ActiveSync becoming a widely available protocol that allowed broad Exchange interoperability with mobile devices without a third party server and its attendant licensing and the adoption of graphical full-screen touch devices which enabled third party applications.
Blackberry wanted to keep milking the licensing cow for BES and their handheld devices felt like a DOS prompt in a Windowed world.
My thought was to only route the servers with public IP service through the tunnel, and that's a vanishingly small part of my network traffic overall. Everything else would go out the fiber ISP.
I fooled around with the AWS calculator and figured it would run something like $20-odd dollars a month, and that was using a pretty pessimistic (high) traffic volume.
Thanks for the DigitalOcean pointer. It's surprisingly hard to search for a hosting provider that supports FreeBSD and either has a pre-configured pfsense image or will let you use your own ISO.
I'd consider direct FreeBSD support almost a requirement, as pfsense has enough weirdness built into it that getting it working in a cloud environment has some gotchas built in before you work against the grain of a hosting environment tuned for Linux.
That's easy to defeat, either through sheer size or installation location.
A generic small gun safe (not the tin boxes with a lock) is 600+ pounds. I would assume that my theoretical safe would be at least as large if not larger -- thousands of pounds. And bolted into a foundation or someplace where moving it would be impossible.
Liquid nitrogen immersion wouldn't help anyway with a safe with glass relockers, as breaking it after freezing the steel would break the glass relockers, triggering the destruct mechanism.
Business class. It's kind of a ripoff from a pure speed perspective, but it was really easy to get a/29 and they will set PTR records for you. None of the fiber options that I can get -- CenturyLink or US Internet have an equivalent service they will sell to residential addresses.
I did have a crazy idea, though -- run pfsense as a cloud VM, IPSec to my home network and present my public facing network via the cloud hosted pfsense static IP. It would crimp my style, but I could get by with 2 or maybe even 1 public IP address. Mostly what I access is fairly non-interactive like file syncs or email, so the added latency or reduced throughput of the IPSec session shouldn't be too burdensome.
I can make it work in a virtual lab setup (I wasn't sure if pfsense could port forward for IPSec tunnel remote networks, but it can).
I figure this way I could indulge in the goodness of gig Internet and enjoy the benefits of a static IP via the cloud.
My only complaints so far are that AWS has no pfesnse images except for a "rental" that's outrageously expensive and has other drawbacks (like no updating; the authors have to release an updated image). I found another host that supports FreeBSD and will let you boot your own ISO installers, but I'm skeptical they have the network that Amazon does and the pricing is less transparent than Amazon.
Is it specifically illegal to build a self-destructing safe? Is it some kind of a requirement that all safes be made crackable?
A lot of better safes have multiple defenses -- drill-resistant layers, thick steel, re-locking mechanisms to resist physical force. In theory, a plasma lance or other exotic cutting tools and enough time could get through anything, although many of the methods themselves run the risk of destroying the contents.
But what if you combined all that with some mechanism that would destroy the contents if there was an attempt at forced entry? Obviously an explosive might be a problem, but maybe some kind of self-incineration engineered to destroy specific contents but ultimately be self-extinguishing or self-contained.
I guess I just think of a well-designed smartphone to be not much different -- extremely difficult to break and it risks the destruction of the contents even trying.
I don't think the FBI or DOJ are playing a legal short game, I think they're playing a political long game where they're looking for a legislative solution that would bypass the courts and survive some kind of constitutional challenge. Congress has historically been given wide latitude to regulate interstate commerce and it's not hard to see a law enacted that regulates commercial encryption products that requires their makers to assist lawful law enforcement requests for assistance in decrypting their products.
I don't really buy the bad for business argument that much, though. Even if Apple were to provide some way of granting the government "assistance" I would wager the technology would still be good enough for all but the most high risk situations, and less vulnerable than similar technology made anywhere else. There are few nations on Earth that don't already have fairly draconian public security and censorship as it is -- whose security technology are you going to trust -- Indian? Chinese? Russian?
It'd be nice if Norway, Sweden, Switzerland or the Netherlands produced a secure communications device backed by their own country's strong constitutional protections against invasion of privacy. But they would also be subject to diplomatic pressure to cooperate with law enforcement and intelligence services, something which a US based company can more easily fend off. Even the Swiss caved on a lot of bank secrecy under pressure from the US to go after tax evaders.
Overall, I hope the FBI loses on this issue. I think they're looking for the ability to conduct anytime, anywhere surveillance that has no limits and it's scary.
I would think that the slightly increased local temperature of the drive would actually keep moisture away.
They sell small heaters (which get no more than warm to the touch) for use in gun safes to keep the inside warm enough to ward off humidity. I have on in my safe and haven't seen any spotting problems on anything.
So a crap load of tax dollars are propping this market up. It actually goes further than this. There are many state and Dept of Energy programs that further fix the rate of solar power to above market rates, to provide guaranteed returns for utility solar power.
I'm inclined to believe that a big chunk of solar's success boils down to tax credits, not inherent economic viability.
But then there's all the complaints about the subsidies to carbon energy, which are at least fair on the surface.
My question, though, is why is a huge necessity like energy subsidized at all? Is it perverse competition incentives, like giving a tax break to some oil related industry in order to attract jobs from some other state's similar industry? Extremely indirect subsidies, like enhanced coast guard patrolling of offshore oil fields for safety or security purposes?
And do indirect subsidies like this actually count towards the actual cost of energy?
I didn't realize how well Sanders was doing against Trump head-to-head. I've definitely heard there is some Democratic crossover to Trump and some kind of weird, mutual appeal that Sanders and Trump both have to a segment of the electorate.
I think the +4% advantage you show for Sanders over Clinton in a matchup with Trump shows there are some Sanders supporters willing to vote Trump over Clinton, which kind of reinforces that sector of the electorate who sees things they like in both candidates (or a shared dislike of Clinton).
Politicians like trump happen when reality is collectively denied for too long.
I think this is it. For whatever the reason, it does appear that there are number of dubious narratives that the media and various forms of the establishment (government, business, etc) have become invested in that have an emperor's new clothes quality about them. These narratives seem to fly in the face of common sense reasoning and direct evidence.
I think after a while anyone who's willing to describe reality as commonly accepted is given a lot of latitude on other subjects.
Standard disclaimer: I am not a Trump supporter. I think his statements are way too off the wall to be taken seriously, although I do like that he was the first to come out critical of H1Bs, but offhand it's the only thing I would say I've liked and can take seriously (or as serious as you can take anything he might say).
That being said, the groupthink paranoia about him is reaching amazing heights. I *still* put the odds of him winning the Republican primary at less than 50-50 and think his negative numbers are way too high to defeat Clinton or possibly even Sanders.
But geeze, the hostility towards him even presenting his message is pretty remarkable. I'd say it's more vitriolic than even the most conservative voices during Obama's election, especially with all the desire to "shut him down" and silence him.
I say let the guy run -- for office, and his mouth -- and let him participate in the marketplace of ideas, and if his ideas are truly unappealing to the majority of voters then his candidacy will fail. No need for street fighting or banana republic election tactics to "stop" his candidacy. And I also think anyone supporting that kind of mindset better be prepared to be on the receiving end of it WITHOUT COMPLAINING.
The funny thing about all the hostility towards him is that even when a serious, liberal newspaper profiles some of his supporters, they aren't just 70 year old white men from the countryside. The NY Times today even acknowledged his campaign staff in Tampa is fairly diverse, which is all part of the weird mystery of Trump and perhaps some genuine truth that there's something rotten about the conventional truths that people just aren't buying anymore.
"Hi, Backblaze? This is DropBox calling. We're sick of sucking on Amazon's tit and wanted to do our own storage. Mind sending us all your details so we can do it just like you did? I'm pretty sure we couldn't do it better than you do, and boy do we love reading your hard disk diagnostic reports -- we're already hitting all the Best Buys we can find for disks."
Even if Backblaze has "opened" their storage system so anyone can copy it, who says it's the optimal way to do anything? I'm guessing at Dropbox scale there's more to it than just how you use individual disk drives.
the concept of a militia of citizens standing up against the government is just laughable.
You must still be celebrating the decisive victory of the US military over the Iraqi insurgency and the Afghani Taliban and planning your victory party for the military's certain ability to use its firepower to defeat ISIS.
Our county government building has airport-style security screenings to get to ordinary places where you do generic bureaucratic business like obtaining a copy of a deed or those kinds of transactions.
What does it mean when the government is so afraid of its citizens it needs armed security screenings before they can be allowed in? In a democracy?
In this case, we're told it's to prevent violence after a string of attacks around courtrooms, in my mind it's because the state is afraid of its population. Its criminal justice system has become so grossly unjust and people so frustrated that they're willing to turn to violence.
In the case of cops at the workplace during a mass firing, I think it's the same fear, plus that work is inherently coercive.
What's interesting about this is that management actually senses the fear and hatred and potential for violence enough to bring in the state security apparatus.
It'd be kind of interesting to be a fly on the wall during the meetings where they decided to bring in the cops and if even one of them had the nerve to acknowledge the whole reason they might need them is how badly they were fucking over their employees.
I also wonder how many of their senior management had paid goons staking out their houses at night or who decided that day would have been a great one for the family to vacation in Florida.
I seem to remember during the financial meltdown in 2007/2008 reading a quote in the NY Times that high level Wall Street types were going nuts for gun permits and armed security.
FBI crime statistics say otherwise. Blacks commit violent crimes in numbers that far exceed their rate in the population, and no amount of racial bias can explain the deviation, either, especially since a lot of the victims are black, too.
It's not support for Islam, it's the ideology of multiculturalism that seeks to sweep under the rug the negative attributes of non-white and non-Western cultures. The blatant and disingenuous lack of acknowledgement of violence associated with Islam is no different than the willingness to ignore the rampant criminality among Blacks.
The false equivalence applied to Christians who discriminate according to their religious beliefs isn't much different, and is its own hypocritical moral relativism. Given the atrocious treatment of gays and women among Muslim populations, you would expect at least an equivalent criticism of Islam -- yet instead, we get apologists, and apologists who defend "voluntary" cultural practices like restrictive dress for women or support for Islamic workers who are fired because they can't walk away from their jobs to pray whenever they want. Can you imagine how little support they would provide if Christians demanded prayer time on their own terms from a liberal-owned business?
I believe the obfuscated browsing is intentional on their part, designed to mask the limited content available and somehow make it seem as if there is more content than there really is.
I seem to recall when they first started streaming, there were better search options but it often returned basically null results. I think that plus the initial rise of complaints about how little content there was actually available for streaming have led them to "refine" the user interface to make it seem if there was more content than they actually have.
Even Amazon and AppleTV aren't much better and they have larger catalogs since they include rental and purchase content. I was browsing Prime Instant on the PC the other day and while I could filter content for Prime and Genre, there was no sort option for ratings, unlike all the other Amazon content.
A dirty bomb may lack widespread damage, but think of the terror side of it. It would be major news.
Even if the real toxic range was only a Manhattan city street, you just know that they would end up cordoning off 20+ square blocks, evacuating everyone and make it an exclusion zone for weeks. The economic clusterfuckery would be enormous. There would be lawsuits forever. Entire blocks would get razed due to fears of long term contamination.
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Does Apple have any developer guidelines on use of geolocation information, or do they presume that because there's fine grained controls over privileges that they don't need to have any?
I would think that apps without any rational need for location information (like useless wallpaper apps) would raise a red flag for further scrutiny. Unless of course Apple sees collecting geolocation information on users to resell elsewhere as just "part of the app business model".
I don't know about requirements, I just use theirs because I'm lazy and don't want to do the work to figure out what else to buy. I literally only use it as ethernet handoff to my own equipment so the make/model/features don't mean anything to me. The only thing I don't want is their POS wireless running on it, and mine doesn't have that.
I recently had mine replaced with a newer model after experiencing some problems (which turned out to be local RF cabling issues of my own creation).
I haven't had a reliability problem with their modems, really.
Vultr was another provider I found that looked to be friendly enough for FreeBSD/pfsense.
I need to finally bite the bullet and sign up for at least one of them to at least do a proof of concept to know that it will work as I expect before I decide on a final provider and make the leap to fiber and give up my at home statics (something I've had since getting DSL in 1999).
CenturyLink/Qwest's DSL was always available around here in a pick your own ISP model, so telco provided the signalling and the ISP provided the IP. I had an ISP that gave /30s then.
But the new CL fiber doesn't provide for any static IPs as far as I know. Which isn't too far, all I've done is talk to the rent-a-sales guy who was going door to door. But he did know what I was talking about and said I wasn't the first one to ask, either.
From what I can tell, the other fiber provider, US Internet can do statics, but only for a much pricier business account -- IIRC, it was $250 or something a month, which might be reasonable for an actual business, but is way more than I need to spend.
The idea wouldn't be a safe that blows up and kills the safecracker, but one that uses sensors and failsafes to induce destruction of the contents.
Most high-end safes and vaults have glass rods in them that hold back part of the mechanism that controls entry -- excessive physical force will break these and disable the safe from being opened, often even with the combination. Some have extra bolts that will fall that cannot be retracted by any mechanical means and require extensive physical breaching to enter.
Obviously destroying the contents without harming the structure its housed in or someone trying to enter it is a complex engineering question that's dependent on what's being protected and the means to destroy it. It could be that you'd require the secret info to be stored on heat sensitive paper and enclosed within an internal, self-powered oven that would heat up sufficiently to destroy the document (like a thermal sales slip left in a hot car). Or it could be magnetic media stored basically in a degaussing container that would expose the media to a degaussing field if intrusion was detected. Or maybe some kind of crucible container that would flood with a harsh acid but contain the acid.
Blackberry caved to a number of governments to allow access to their secure network. Not just "help us decrypt this one device" but ongoing access to the entire encrypted network.
I think that had little to do with their failure, though. Their failure was due to ActiveSync becoming a widely available protocol that allowed broad Exchange interoperability with mobile devices without a third party server and its attendant licensing and the adoption of graphical full-screen touch devices which enabled third party applications.
Blackberry wanted to keep milking the licensing cow for BES and their handheld devices felt like a DOS prompt in a Windowed world.
My thought was to only route the servers with public IP service through the tunnel, and that's a vanishingly small part of my network traffic overall. Everything else would go out the fiber ISP.
I fooled around with the AWS calculator and figured it would run something like $20-odd dollars a month, and that was using a pretty pessimistic (high) traffic volume.
Thanks for the DigitalOcean pointer. It's surprisingly hard to search for a hosting provider that supports FreeBSD and either has a pre-configured pfsense image or will let you use your own ISO.
I'd consider direct FreeBSD support almost a requirement, as pfsense has enough weirdness built into it that getting it working in a cloud environment has some gotchas built in before you work against the grain of a hosting environment tuned for Linux.
That's easy to defeat, either through sheer size or installation location.
A generic small gun safe (not the tin boxes with a lock) is 600+ pounds. I would assume that my theoretical safe would be at least as large if not larger -- thousands of pounds. And bolted into a foundation or someplace where moving it would be impossible.
Liquid nitrogen immersion wouldn't help anyway with a safe with glass relockers, as breaking it after freezing the steel would break the glass relockers, triggering the destruct mechanism.
Business class. It's kind of a ripoff from a pure speed perspective, but it was really easy to get a /29 and they will set PTR records for you. None of the fiber options that I can get -- CenturyLink or US Internet have an equivalent service they will sell to residential addresses.
I did have a crazy idea, though -- run pfsense as a cloud VM, IPSec to my home network and present my public facing network via the cloud hosted pfsense static IP. It would crimp my style, but I could get by with 2 or maybe even 1 public IP address. Mostly what I access is fairly non-interactive like file syncs or email, so the added latency or reduced throughput of the IPSec session shouldn't be too burdensome.
I can make it work in a virtual lab setup (I wasn't sure if pfsense could port forward for IPSec tunnel remote networks, but it can).
I figure this way I could indulge in the goodness of gig Internet and enjoy the benefits of a static IP via the cloud.
My only complaints so far are that AWS has no pfesnse images except for a "rental" that's outrageously expensive and has other drawbacks (like no updating; the authors have to release an updated image). I found another host that supports FreeBSD and will let you boot your own ISO installers, but I'm skeptical they have the network that Amazon does and the pricing is less transparent than Amazon.
Is it specifically illegal to build a self-destructing safe? Is it some kind of a requirement that all safes be made crackable?
A lot of better safes have multiple defenses -- drill-resistant layers, thick steel, re-locking mechanisms to resist physical force. In theory, a plasma lance or other exotic cutting tools and enough time could get through anything, although many of the methods themselves run the risk of destroying the contents.
But what if you combined all that with some mechanism that would destroy the contents if there was an attempt at forced entry? Obviously an explosive might be a problem, but maybe some kind of self-incineration engineered to destroy specific contents but ultimately be self-extinguishing or self-contained.
I guess I just think of a well-designed smartphone to be not much different -- extremely difficult to break and it risks the destruction of the contents even trying.
I don't think the FBI or DOJ are playing a legal short game, I think they're playing a political long game where they're looking for a legislative solution that would bypass the courts and survive some kind of constitutional challenge. Congress has historically been given wide latitude to regulate interstate commerce and it's not hard to see a law enacted that regulates commercial encryption products that requires their makers to assist lawful law enforcement requests for assistance in decrypting their products.
I don't really buy the bad for business argument that much, though. Even if Apple were to provide some way of granting the government "assistance" I would wager the technology would still be good enough for all but the most high risk situations, and less vulnerable than similar technology made anywhere else. There are few nations on Earth that don't already have fairly draconian public security and censorship as it is -- whose security technology are you going to trust -- Indian? Chinese? Russian?
It'd be nice if Norway, Sweden, Switzerland or the Netherlands produced a secure communications device backed by their own country's strong constitutional protections against invasion of privacy. But they would also be subject to diplomatic pressure to cooperate with law enforcement and intelligence services, something which a US based company can more easily fend off. Even the Swiss caved on a lot of bank secrecy under pressure from the US to go after tax evaders.
Overall, I hope the FBI loses on this issue. I think they're looking for the ability to conduct anytime, anywhere surveillance that has no limits and it's scary.
I would think that the slightly increased local temperature of the drive would actually keep moisture away.
They sell small heaters (which get no more than warm to the touch) for use in gun safes to keep the inside warm enough to ward off humidity. I have on in my safe and haven't seen any spotting problems on anything.
So a crap load of tax dollars are propping this market up. It actually goes further than this. There are many state and Dept of Energy programs that further fix the rate of solar power to above market rates, to provide guaranteed returns for utility solar power.
I'm inclined to believe that a big chunk of solar's success boils down to tax credits, not inherent economic viability.
But then there's all the complaints about the subsidies to carbon energy, which are at least fair on the surface.
My question, though, is why is a huge necessity like energy subsidized at all? Is it perverse competition incentives, like giving a tax break to some oil related industry in order to attract jobs from some other state's similar industry? Extremely indirect subsidies, like enhanced coast guard patrolling of offshore oil fields for safety or security purposes?
And do indirect subsidies like this actually count towards the actual cost of energy?
I didn't realize how well Sanders was doing against Trump head-to-head. I've definitely heard there is some Democratic crossover to Trump and some kind of weird, mutual appeal that Sanders and Trump both have to a segment of the electorate.
I think the +4% advantage you show for Sanders over Clinton in a matchup with Trump shows there are some Sanders supporters willing to vote Trump over Clinton, which kind of reinforces that sector of the electorate who sees things they like in both candidates (or a shared dislike of Clinton).
Politicians like trump happen when reality is collectively denied for too long.
I think this is it. For whatever the reason, it does appear that there are number of dubious narratives that the media and various forms of the establishment (government, business, etc) have become invested in that have an emperor's new clothes quality about them. These narratives seem to fly in the face of common sense reasoning and direct evidence.
I think after a while anyone who's willing to describe reality as commonly accepted is given a lot of latitude on other subjects.
Standard disclaimer: I am not a Trump supporter. I think his statements are way too off the wall to be taken seriously, although I do like that he was the first to come out critical of H1Bs, but offhand it's the only thing I would say I've liked and can take seriously (or as serious as you can take anything he might say).
That being said, the groupthink paranoia about him is reaching amazing heights. I *still* put the odds of him winning the Republican primary at less than 50-50 and think his negative numbers are way too high to defeat Clinton or possibly even Sanders.
But geeze, the hostility towards him even presenting his message is pretty remarkable. I'd say it's more vitriolic than even the most conservative voices during Obama's election, especially with all the desire to "shut him down" and silence him.
I say let the guy run -- for office, and his mouth -- and let him participate in the marketplace of ideas, and if his ideas are truly unappealing to the majority of voters then his candidacy will fail. No need for street fighting or banana republic election tactics to "stop" his candidacy. And I also think anyone supporting that kind of mindset better be prepared to be on the receiving end of it WITHOUT COMPLAINING.
The funny thing about all the hostility towards him is that even when a serious, liberal newspaper profiles some of his supporters, they aren't just 70 year old white men from the countryside. The NY Times today even acknowledged his campaign staff in Tampa is fairly diverse, which is all part of the weird mystery of Trump and perhaps some genuine truth that there's something rotten about the conventional truths that people just aren't buying anymore.
"Hi, Backblaze? This is DropBox calling. We're sick of sucking on Amazon's tit and wanted to do our own storage. Mind sending us all your details so we can do it just like you did? I'm pretty sure we couldn't do it better than you do, and boy do we love reading your hard disk diagnostic reports -- we're already hitting all the Best Buys we can find for disks."
Even if Backblaze has "opened" their storage system so anyone can copy it, who says it's the optimal way to do anything? I'm guessing at Dropbox scale there's more to it than just how you use individual disk drives.
the concept of a militia of citizens standing up against the government is just laughable.
You must still be celebrating the decisive victory of the US military over the Iraqi insurgency and the Afghani Taliban and planning your victory party for the military's certain ability to use its firepower to defeat ISIS.
More are happening, but in small ways.
Our county government building has airport-style security screenings to get to ordinary places where you do generic bureaucratic business like obtaining a copy of a deed or those kinds of transactions.
What does it mean when the government is so afraid of its citizens it needs armed security screenings before they can be allowed in? In a democracy?
In this case, we're told it's to prevent violence after a string of attacks around courtrooms, in my mind it's because the state is afraid of its population. Its criminal justice system has become so grossly unjust and people so frustrated that they're willing to turn to violence.
In the case of cops at the workplace during a mass firing, I think it's the same fear, plus that work is inherently coercive.
What's interesting about this is that management actually senses the fear and hatred and potential for violence enough to bring in the state security apparatus.
It'd be kind of interesting to be a fly on the wall during the meetings where they decided to bring in the cops and if even one of them had the nerve to acknowledge the whole reason they might need them is how badly they were fucking over their employees.
I also wonder how many of their senior management had paid goons staking out their houses at night or who decided that day would have been a great one for the family to vacation in Florida.
I seem to remember during the financial meltdown in 2007/2008 reading a quote in the NY Times that high level Wall Street types were going nuts for gun permits and armed security.
FBI crime statistics say otherwise. Blacks commit violent crimes in numbers that far exceed their rate in the population, and no amount of racial bias can explain the deviation, either, especially since a lot of the victims are black, too.
It's not support for Islam, it's the ideology of multiculturalism that seeks to sweep under the rug the negative attributes of non-white and non-Western cultures. The blatant and disingenuous lack of acknowledgement of violence associated with Islam is no different than the willingness to ignore the rampant criminality among Blacks.
The false equivalence applied to Christians who discriminate according to their religious beliefs isn't much different, and is its own hypocritical moral relativism. Given the atrocious treatment of gays and women among Muslim populations, you would expect at least an equivalent criticism of Islam -- yet instead, we get apologists, and apologists who defend "voluntary" cultural practices like restrictive dress for women or support for Islamic workers who are fired because they can't walk away from their jobs to pray whenever they want. Can you imagine how little support they would provide if Christians demanded prayer time on their own terms from a liberal-owned business?
I believe the obfuscated browsing is intentional on their part, designed to mask the limited content available and somehow make it seem as if there is more content than there really is.
I seem to recall when they first started streaming, there were better search options but it often returned basically null results. I think that plus the initial rise of complaints about how little content there was actually available for streaming have led them to "refine" the user interface to make it seem if there was more content than they actually have.
Even Amazon and AppleTV aren't much better and they have larger catalogs since they include rental and purchase content. I was browsing Prime Instant on the PC the other day and while I could filter content for Prime and Genre, there was no sort option for ratings, unlike all the other Amazon content.
A dirty bomb may lack widespread damage, but think of the terror side of it. It would be major news.
Even if the real toxic range was only a Manhattan city street, you just know that they would end up cordoning off 20+ square blocks, evacuating everyone and make it an exclusion zone for weeks. The economic clusterfuckery would be enormous. There would be lawsuits forever. Entire blocks would get razed due to fears of long term contamination.